Lots of visible likes and shares on social lead people to spread more misinformation

It’s time to rethink engagement metrics, say the authors of a paper published last week in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review. Mihai Avram, Nicholas Micallef, Sameer Patil, and Filippo Menczer found that “the display of social engagement metrics” — visible displays of how many times a piece of content has been liked and shared, i.e. the norm on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram — “can strongly influence interaction with low-credibility information. The higher the engagement, the more prone people are to sharing questionable content and less to fact checking it.”...